(emphasis on the Pre-Renaissance Period)
Before the European “discovery” of North America, Native Americans performed songs, ceremonies, prayers, and chants in what is called “the oral tradition” of Native American literature. This literature is classified by categories such as creation stories, trickster and hero stories, chants, ceremonies, and rituals. The oral tradition is the foundation for all contemporary Native American writing in English.
The Mohegan minister Samson Occum published his sermons in 1772, and this is considered the first published work by an Indian author. More Native American writers began publishing literature in English in the mid nineteenth century.
The emergence of Native American published literature parallels whites’ conquest of Indian lands and the subsequent education of Native children in boarding schools. Many authors published protest literature and autobiographies in response to attempts to remove Indians from their homelands and eradicate Indian culture.
The most effective Indian protest writer of the 1830s was William Apes, a Pequot. His essay “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man” attacks white prejudice against Indians in Massachusetts. Apes’ autobiography A Son of the Forest (1829) was published at the height of the debate over Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Bill and aimed to sharply criticize white treatment of Indians at this crucial time.
Many Indian writers published autobiographies in the nineteenth century, and these were often transcribed by non-Native editors and published in order to protest current treatment of Native peoples. One of the most famous is The Life of Black Hawk (1833) by the Sauk leader Black Hawk.
One of the most influential books to chronicle the impact of westward expansion on tribal life is Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) by Sarah Winnemucca, a Paiute. The text describes Winnemucca’s experiences negotiating between Indians and whites during the Bannock War of 1876, and criticizes federal Indian policy for ignoring the needs of Indian people as they lost their lands and resources.
John Rollin Ridge published the first novel by an Indian author in 1854, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta. The novel portrays how whites’ unjust treatment of a mixed-race protagonist causes him to seek revenge against the dominant culture and become a “noble outlaw” in frontier California.
Charles Eastman, Zitkala-Sa, and Luther Standing Bear (all Sioux) were prominent writers of the early twentieth century, who wrote about cultural struggles from an assimilated perspective. These writers both promoted the virtues of assimilation for Indians and emphasized the “civilized” aspects of traditional tribal life, in order to gain respect for Indians within the dominant culture. Zitkala-Sa and Standing Bear were more critical of the process of assimilation, with critiques of the ways in which boarding schools in particular forbid Native children to speak their languages or practice tribal customs.
D’Arcy McNickle (Cree/Flathead) is the most important Indian ethnohistorian to publish in the early twentieth century. McNickle’s novel The Surrounded stands as a model for much writing of the “Native American Renaissance” in its depiction of a mixed-blood protagonist searching for his identity. The Surrounded has been celebrated as the most polished novel by a Native author in the early twentieth century.
N. Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for his modernist novel House Made of Dawn, a moment that is often referred to as the beginning of the “Native American Renaissance.” Momaday is credited with bringing Native American writing into mainstream culture and his novel received much critical acclaim from the literary establishment. In part because of Momaday’s success, other Native American authors such as Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, Louise Erdrich, and Sherman Alexie found increasingly receptive audiences and more publishing opportunities.
The Native American Renaissance also highlighted a theme that would characterize much contemporary Native American literature: that of the alienated male protagonist who returns to his reservation after living alone in the dominant society, and finds himself caught between two worlds as he searches for a viable identity.
More recently, writers and critics have tried to move beyond the conflict (or false dilemma) between tradition and assimilation that characterizes much writing of the Native American Renaissance. Writers such as Louise Erdrich, Thomas King, Greg Sarris, and Gerald Vizenor utilize postmodern strategies and themes such as hybridity and fragmentation in order to explore new possibilities for Native American identity. A debate has ensued over the benefits and drawbacks of maintaining a more separatist, nationalistic Native identity versus emphasizing a hybrid, “mixed” identity that fuses elements of Native and mainstream cultures.
Key Themes in Contemporary Native American Literature· a post-apocalyptic sense of life: after near extinction and destruction, Native American writers often convey a sense that the apocalypse, or end of the world, has already occurred
· Tragic defeat and cultural destruction associated with the myth of the “vanishing Indian”
· Survival and continuance by adapting old stories and customs to new circumstances
· A sense of being caught between traditional tribal ways and modern, mainstream American society
· A sense of community and a communal sense of identity, based on notions of kinship and interdependence
· The power of language and stories to shape identity, both individual and collective
· A sense of the interconnectedness of all things, focusing on relationships between animals, land, people, and language
· An acute awareness of the loss of ancestral homelands or “the presence of absence”; place, self, and community are so intimately linked that the loss of land is a loss of psychic strength
· a focus on specific places as opposed to “lighting out for the territory” and migrating to new frontiers
· a response to Euro-American stereotypes of savagery and primitivism, and to romantic notions of the ecological and spiritual wisdom of Native peoples